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Beyond Schadenfreude

Hi. I'm Josh. I'm been shvitzing all summer, though this week it's official. Since I am a nice Jewish kid from Manhattan it is going to take a concerted effort for me not to constantly link to the New York … Read More

Hi. I'm Josh. I'm been shvitzing all summer, though this week it's official. Since I am a nice Jewish kid from Manhattan it is going to take a concerted effort for me not to constantly link to the New York Times. In that spirit, I had planned to start safe and make a day out of Time, where Mother Teresa's dark night is given the cover treatment and Rudy Giuliani is sufficiently panned. I was all set to reiterate the Giuliani panning, maybe even explore Hitchens' hypocrisy re: Teresa's hypocrisy, when, bam!, my NYT homepage refreshed to reveal the remarkable: the Gonzales resignation. When I watched Gonzales testify on television re: the attorney firings he looked like a murderer protected by double jeopardy. But then Rove, and now this. Both Rove and Gonzales have been with Bush since his reign in Texas. I'm sure Bush'll stick with the "unfair treatment" line for Gonzales.

Anyhow, I'm already really late to the party in blog years, and so now that the palpable (and justified) glee is subsiding, I think it's fair to ask, who's next? There's nowhere to go but up from here, and that means Cheney. If that seems absolutely unlikely, so did this. Then, also, there's this important question: Is the world watching? And what do they think? I ask because several minutes after the NYT broke the news, I got a text message from a friend from Germany which read: "Come to Berlin. Ur ship is sinking, homey." Forgetting that the German called me homey, it was both surprising and worrisome to me that rather than see this as the rightful purging of all that has ailed our great country for the past seven odd years, my friend triumphantly indulged in schadenfreude at the further disintegration of the Bush administration. How are the Democratic candidates going to respond to this? And how are Liberals in general–the blogosphere especially–going to translate their celebration into a serious moving-forward?

Further reading: Besides the cover story which asks "What took you so long?" over at Slate, John Dickerson has a short and interesting piece laying out the psychology of the Bush administration. He claims, among other things, that "the more radioactive his aides become, the more Bush embraces them." Maybe Bush has a death wish. Has he ever been in therapy?